Texas Appleseed

Empowering Parents to Advocate for Their Child's Education

Texas Appleseed participates in collaborative projects with other Appleseed Centers—including this project to analyze how school districts across the country are implementing the parent involvement requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act. This project compliments our work on the School-to-Prison Pipeline examining how school disciplinary policies relate to dropout rates and future involvement in the justice system.

Latest News

Texas Appleseed is presenting its findings to organizations and community groups around the state.

Texas Appleseed is developing a guide for parents to help them better interact with the schools around student discipline issues.

Project Background

In late 2005, six state Appleseed centers, including Texas, embarked on a collaborative project exploring the link between parental involvement and improved student academic performance. In September 2006, research results were released in a report, “It Takes A Parent: Transforming Education in the Wake of the No Child Left Behind Act.” This comprehensive evaluation of parent involvement in 18 school districts across the country documented that low-income and non-English speaking families having the most difficulty interacting with their child's school.

Other key findings include:

Too many parents fail to receive clear and timely information about the academic performance of their children and their schools, and contradictory performance ratings of the same school add to the confusion.

Poverty, limited English proficiency and varying cultural expectations are among the biggest barriers to parental involvement.

Poor communication, transportation problems and work schedule conflicts hinder parents' ability to exercise NCLB's school choice and supplemental education services (SES) options when their home school is judged “low-performing.”

Texas Appleseed recommends delivering key information to parents in a variety of formats—including bilingual television, Internet and print; providing testing and other data in clear, easy-to-understand formats in multiple languages and offering school-based interpreter services.